February 2018 posts

February 27, 2018

Many people are curious about becoming a voice actor, but it’s a skill. It’s acting and producing, recording, and editing. So, you can’t just be a pretty voice. You have to be an actor and a sound engineer too. This is why it was a challenge to find just the right voice actress to produce the audiobook for Hidden in Paris, someone who could juggle all these things and be able to pronounce French words correctly. In the end, I’m thrilled with my collaboration with Phe Caplan. She was so easy to work with and she did a terrific job.

I thought I would ask her about the process of voice acting and audiobook recording. Here is what she had to say:

Corine: How has your background as an actress helped you with voice acting? How is that different from regular acting and how is it similar? Is voice acting more liberating or more restrictive?

Phe: What I love about acting is being able to feel something that I may not get to actually experience in my real life. That can be exhilarating or painful, but I love the emotion of it all. Everyday life is satisfying in its own way, but the drama and intensity of fiction is heightened. That’s why it’s written. It’s a story that needs to be told. And as an actress, I get to live that. Voice acting strips everything down to the bare bones of it all. The emotion, the desires and the way the character views the world. There are no costumes, no makeup, no sets. Just me, the words, and the story behind the words. In some ways, it’s not as much fun, and sometimes I have to work harder to give it breath, but it is liberating that I don’t have to be concerned with how it looks. I don’t have to break up a scene into minute details in order to get the right shot. I just have to relax, feel the moment, and let it go.

Corine: You live parts of the year in Germany and you recorded on two continents while raising two young children. Besides the logistical and technical challenges this presented, how do you feel that your experience as a mother and part time expatriate informed how you chose to inhabit the characters?

Phe: I had a deeper understanding of what it means to uproot and relocate. There is a strange thing that happens when you move somewhere where you don’t speak the language. At first, there is this clinging to the familiar. Trying to make things exactly like they were at home. Then, as you begin to trust your new place, you begin to embrace the things that are different. That’s where the growing starts. And allowing yourself to love both places is a big one, too. I knew that feeling that Annie had when she first moved to France. The question of, “What will I do now?” lingers for a while. But then she, like I did, found things she loved about France (Berlin) and grabbed onto it. She sunk her teeth into French more than I was able to with German, but the basic tenet is there. I think that goes for Lola and Althea too. They came to France to try to get away from their lives in America. But it wasn’t until they were able to accept their new reality that they were able to grow and accept themselves, wherever they were. And being a mom puts a whole other level of importance on almost everything. Priorities shift from ‘what’s best for me’ to ‘what’s best for them’ and ‘what’s best for our family’. But it’s also important to not let the selflessness get in the way of your mental health and sanity. Moms have to be able to take care of themselves, so they are able to take care of their kids. Both Annie and Lola really come to understand that deeply.

Corine: How were you able to get so well into the skin of male characters? Especially French men?

Phe: I think the human condition is the same for both men and women, it’s just that men express themselves differently. I don’t know that I necessarily treated them differently.

Corine: What parts of the book were the most fun to record, what were the most challenging?

Phe: The beginning is always hardest, until I find my groove. I probably recorded and rerecorded the first chapter 10 times before I felt that I was ‘in the pocket’. It’s also tough when a character is really crying hard. It’s difficult to talk through the emotion sometimes. And since this is an audiobook, the words and the clarity are paramount to anything else, so finding the balance can be tricky. But those parts are also the most fun. And describing the food was really fun, too. Especially speaking in French. Those words almost taste good in your mouth!

Corine: Did you identify with a particular character in the novel?

Phe: I definitely connected a lot with Annie. She and I are very similar in how we deal with things. Humor is important to her. And she wants to feel the truth of her pain but is afraid to move forward. When I was younger, I knew that feeling of the comfort of a deep sadness, because the other option, happiness, is sometimes too scary to imagine. That involves change, which is hard to do. But being on the other side of it now, I understand its importance.

February 23, 2018

These days, I am more likely to listen to a book than to read one. It's a matter of time, decreased eyesight (combined with a stubborn refusal to wear glasses), and overall general laziness. Books are my first great love, but audiobooks are just so full of life and added dimension. And on long freeway commutes they appear to be the better options :-)

I wanted Hidden in Paris to be turned into audiobook, so, armed with ignorance and a DIY mentality, I thought no big deal. I wrote the whole book, for heaven's sake: I'm pretty certain I can read it and record myself.

Hmm. Non.

I recorded myself and it was hilariously awful. My French accent --the one that I have, for years, believed to be light and discreet --is in fact thick as sauce béarnaise. And, to my surprise, I can't seem to say three words without saying heuu (French equivalent of hmm) or my throat emitting clicking noises like some alien species straight out of Star Trek.

My DIY ambitions were promptly abandoned.

It was such a fun process, and relief, working with a Pro! Phe Caplan is the voice actress and producer of the audiobook. Phe and I discussed the pronunciations of French words, how I envisioned the characters' voices and tones, and then she ran with it. She recorded, produced, and edited the audiofile, chapter by chapter, uploaded it to Audible.com. Her voices, without the slightest throat-clicking noise, flews through the characters' personalities, their accents, their genders. Phe was also lovely and easy to work with. If you read this and are thinking of hiring a voice actress, she is your person! She can do sultry. She can do naive. She can do a 50 year old French man as easily as she can do a 25 year old American woman. (I asked her about her process and will put our discussion into another post soon.)

Here is the Hidden in Paris audiobook trailer, please check it out and tell me what you think. PS: my son did the music to the trailer, I love it!

February 13, 2018

I was thinking that the meaning of the verb sharing has changed dramatically. To share. Partager, in French. It used to be that sharing was to have something and give a bit of it to someone else. Sharing was special. It meant something. In the process of sharing you became richer, more generous, more human.

Now we share all the time. We are compelled to share. Society demands that we share. But are we sharing the right stuff? I mean humans have grown so unbelievably selfish and insulated on the one hand (probably the result of being bombarded by information we cannot fully process), yet there are 'share' buttons everywhere. We share on twitter, we share on instagram, via email, on facebook. We share willy nilly things that weren't ours in the first place: a photograph, a post, a thought. We don't even have to believe the thought. We don't even have to be thinking it. But we share it, perhaps in an effort to be relevant, to do something. To be something.

And so it goes full circle. By sharing we add to overwhelming load of stuff thats that we human are supposed to process through a day but can't. I mean if you are on twitter and instagram, and whatnot, you are pulled in so many direction, how can you cope? How can you even find the time and sanity required to tie your show laces? Everyone is sharing, no one is listening, or caring. Everyone is overwhelmed. There is no time. People are counting their followers and their retweets, which have become the yardsticks of popularity. If your tweet aren't retweeted, and your facebook posts not liked, do you even exist?

There is apparenly something invented for the occasion called FOMO (that's fear of missing out for those of us over the age of 30). We don't want to MO (Miss Out ?), but MO on what? On more tweets, more facebook posts? More things to rev us up and distract us from any kind of depth?

In the early days of blogging, it felt as though you could make friends that way. The world was a gigantic place but through blogging, a few people discovered your existence and you discovered theirs, and that was really nice. No one was selling anything. Blogs were not platform for something else. They weren't glorified sales pitches. Blogging wasn't networking, it wasn't working, it wasn't branding. What it was, was good old-fashion oversharing.

And oversharing I did! And promptly got into a heap of trouble with friends and family. Oh the delights in hitting that publish button! Oh the humanity when you did so on impulse and without measuring the effect it might have on your life and other people's.

So I got a bit scared of it. It became easier to share less of myself and more of other people: their thoughts, their ideas, their photos. Tweet it, facebook it, instagram it and voila, you had blogged.

This is a strange time we are in. It's hard to remember what has meaning these days. We don't know what is true. Or deep down we do, but we are assailed by everyone's 140 characters opinions smothered in a thick sauce of disinformation, so we are not sure we should believe our instinct. The new kind of sharing happens at supersonic speed. We see something that sounds interesting, or wrong, or worth being on high alert and we share it, quick. We want to be the first ones. Also, by doing so, we are not taking much of a risk. After all, it isn't our own thinking we are messing with. Our own thinking is safe. Or non-existent at this point.

So this is what I want to try to do on this blog: do a little thinking of my own and hopefully connect with readers in a meaningful way. Thank you for reading all 677 words of this post. I bet not many people will have the energy required. Feel free to 'share' your thoughts.

February 08, 2018

I've experienced it only a few times in my life and each time it was the most magical thing ever.

This morning my husband said, "now that it's summer we could-- " and he interrupted himself realizing that this is February. I know it's hard to feel sorry for us in Southern California when you live in Fargo or something but, believe it or not, 80 degrees in February sucks. I crave winter -- and Paris-- with all my being. I want mittens and hot coco at Angelina's, and the crunch-crunch sound of my boots on a snow-covered Place du Tertre.